‘Extreme’ auto shop owner runs on faith

One thing Clarence Mosley can count on is that people will want their cars to draw attention.

Recently he painted a car with a jack-o’-lantern design and Halloween colors. It was in honor of the owner’s son, who was born on Halloween in 2005.

Another customer brought his car to Mosley’s body shop and asked for him to decorate it with the Phoenix Suns’ colors and logos.

“Everybody always wants a fancy paint job,” Mosley said.

Mosley recently opened Moe-D’s Extreme Auto Body — extreme means there’s no car so dented he won’t work on it — on 12th Street. He moved from a smaller shop a few blocks down the road because he wanted to have more room.

He said that expanding the business hasn’t been easy, and he realizes it might be a few years before he turns a good profit.

“I do it on faith” with “a lot of praying,” Mosley said. “It’s hard, man, but I have a prayer line.”

“I think it’s going to be a success. I just feel it.”

Mosley has been working with cars since he was a kid growing up in Appomattox County. People in his neighborhood used to pay him $5 to wash their cars. Because he was fast, they nicknamed him Motorboat, which has since been shortened to Moe.

Mosley’s first auto body job was in Junction City, Kan., in 1981 when he got out of the Army.

In the late 1980s he got what he called his “big break” running a body shop in the Washington, D.C., area. He earned about $1,200 per week there. “In ’87 I thought I was in hog heaven making that kind of money,” he said.

However, the shop he ran was in a neighborhood with too much violence, he said. He moved back to Appomattox County in the early 1990s.

Mosley has owned his own body shop business since 1999. In 2005, he moved to a small shop at the corner of 12th Street and Campbell Avenue.

“The area has got so many people there, I felt like I need to grow a little bit,” he said. “I only had one bay there. I needed more room to move around and accommodate my customers.”

He moved down the road to another shop beside R.S. Payne Elementary School this spring.

Mosley is what he calls a “one-man show” for auto repair. He can paint, do body work, and even tint windows, which is one thing that keeps business coming. “People call us every day because they want window tinting,” he said.

He said his shop is a discount body shop. The price is higher than in some other shops, but he said he does higher-quality work and does more for the money.

“If I give you an $850 paint job, I’m taking all the dents out. I’m hooking you up,” he said. “… It’s just all a part of the paint job to me.”

He said he is advertising on a local gospel radio station, but he hopes his work advertises itself, too.

“Hopefully if you do good work and people see what you do, they’ll keep coming,” Mosley said, while the parking lot was getting kind of tight out front. “So far, that’s what they’re doing.”